Legion Candidate, Chapter 6

Dusk had dropped over the such-and-such plains on the long highway to who-the-fuck-cares on a planet that looked like a song that played on the radio in one of Morian’s ancient movies. It was eerie in how much it suddenly reminded Ilina of home all at once. The sky lit up like someone flipped a switch with a completely unintelligible sky full of stars she couldn’t make heads or tails of.

The checkpoint ahead was lit by special night-sight preserving amber lights, Krystyn explained it was part of some defense code across the empire. Orbital strikes and insertions were serious threats one had to consider if you were on an edge world, or apparently any world in the empire, and so they had to preserve the ability to observe space anywhere on the planet. White lights reflected off the atmosphere and made observation difficult, but the spectrum of these lights didn’t.

Krystyn always thought Ilina didn’t pay attention, but she liked this kind of thing. Reminded her of the sorts of things she’d learn reading the documents in Irene’s office. Mama taught her all of Irene’s little traps and how she could tell if someone had been snooping around so she could avoid them all.

Ilina stepped up to the hole in her heart and nearly tumbled into it. Now wasn’t the time to think about them. It had been so long, and bits and pieces started to come back to her at unexpected times, like when she was in the middle of pulling her compact rifle out of her travel bag. Domon infantry wore ceramic plates in their body armor, pretty standard anywhere since the principle of diffusing force by breaking things couldn’t advance too much farther without getting weird with it. Not like bullets had gotten much better either.

Cassie had started to talk about the plan for talking their way through the checkpoint. That was fine, but Ilina had orders not to get flagged enough to become a person of interest on any world they hadn’t liberated yet, so Ilina wasn’t about to get caught by it.

She reached into an inside pocket in her leather jacket and pulled out her combat collar. A disk with a wide ribbon that she wrapped around her neck, placing the disk on the back of her neck and sealing the ribbon. It ratcheted itself tight enough it wouldn’t slide around accidentally with a little twist. With a tap she unleashed the ghosts.

The Again in Hell was in orbit, and the full suite of options that came with wearing it were just as distant. But this disk contained an echo of the techniques and predictive reasoning the Hell’s ghost core was capable of. Hell’s neural interface opened up in Ilina’s mind and the heads up display blossomed in Hunter’s vision. The ghosts weren’t as chatty as in the Hell, but she felt hundreds of hands grasping her limbs confident in their guidance as always, ready to push her meat to its limit like they did their home armor.

Hunter donned her armor, as much as it could be called that. A pair of fingerless gloves with studded knuckles for striking. A scarf to cover her nose and mouth to mask her features. A cap she could pull her ponytail through to block cameras above. A crossbody bag fastened over her leather jacket with a pair of spare magazines and a trio of ordnance in easy-access elastic pouches. State soldiers needed armor because they never had the first strike advantage.

She kicked the rest of her bag under Krystyn’s seat and rolled over the back of the jeep, hanging out of sight on one arm and bracing herself with a foot planted on the bumper. Cassie slowed the jeep as they approached the little two-building checkpoint — two vehicles in a shielded carport on one side, suggested eight to ten hostiles — and lowered herself to the ground when it reached a speed that she could safely run off from.

There was a full antenna array atop the main building for both regular comms and signal catching, and cameras covering the corners and long angles. A long list of variables passed between Hunter and her passengers as she approached. Low-light cameras wouldn’t play well with the color-vision destroying amber lamps that ringed the checkpoint. Remote location with a visible incinerator for burnables and a large locked dumpster peaking out from behind the building said that they wouldn’t have motion alarms set due to false positives.

Cassie turned up the radio slowly in time with her approach. The old girl wasn’t an amateur. Hunter fired once, twice, taking out the two cameras covering her direct approach just before the music got shut off. Every second counted. Hunter tossed an IED toward the rear door, a wireless trigger like the Hell’s spike grenades, and vaulted up the dumpster and onto the roof and toward the comms array.

She had a lot of experience sabotaging stations like these back home. If you’re quiet you can pop the box and wire in a tap and it could be months before anyone found it. Hunter was scum of the earth down to her very core, not a single shred of moral fiber to be found, so her preferred method of sabotage was to partially damage a part of the array and rig an explosive in the controller to take out whichever poor sap was sent to repair it. Her goal was much simpler tonight: disable communications out. No distress beacons. No real-time data on people coming through.

Hunter shot the lock on the controller shroud and slammed the body from the shackle with the stock of her rifle. Inside the shroud were some simple, weather resistant connectors, but nothing that needed any tooling. She ripped those out with one hand and used her other hand to put two rounds into the electrical junction at the base.

The rear door slammed open as the first shots were fired near Cassie and Krystyn at the building’s front, and shouting erupted from both. Hunter pulled a flash from her crossbody as she triggered the explosive, some voice cut short. She landed in viscera in front of her ingress point tossing the flash down the short hallway into the main room and took cover beside the door. A beat later the inside of the checkpoint was rocked by the shockwave and she moved in quick on its heels.

Two bullets in the chest of someone floored by the IED. Three bullets into a soldier not quick enough to take cover from the flash. Hunter vaulted a desk and put four into someone cowering under it without looking. Another soldier was scrambling to their feet and trying to get their bearings. She set the stock under her arm and held down the trigger putting six into them as she surveyed the room.

Twenty shots fired.

Five targets down.

Krystyn and Cassie shouted from outside. They’d subdued whoever was outside with them. The calculations ran. Two or four outside. That put total hostiles down between seven and nine.

The creak of leather and the slightest rustling of a belt from behind her. Hunter spun and moved to close the distance toward the soldier behind her before he could steady his gun. He extended his arm to aim instead of keeping the gun away from her close in the close space. Irene beat that mistake out of her when she was young. She pushed it to the side with her forearm as he fired, sending the bullet into the floor behind her. He took an undisciplined step away as Hunter shifted her weight and threw a punch — should have moved toward her so her strike wouldn’t have hit at full power, but there were few people who were trained the way she was.

Metal met bone. The man’s jaw was made concave, and Hunter used the breath after impact to take the gun from his hand and empty the magazine into the falling corpse.

Eight to ten hostiles down.

“Clear!” Hunter shouted over her shoulder as Krystyn and Halbach entered the room.

“Fucking psychopaths!” Halbach was laughing from her gut. “Shit. Fuck!”

Blood ran down Krystyn’s arm from a grazed shot, but otherwise she seemed intact. That would need attention. “What’s next?” She waited for Hunter’s direction, checking the magazine of whichever gun she’d picked up in the conflict outside.

Hunter pointed across the road to the shielded carport and Krystyn nodded. Halbach let out a long whistle as she took in Hunter’s handiwork. She could do whatever she wanted. Hunter moved back toward the hallway she entered from and cracked open a utility closet under the antenna array on the roof. The drop-ceiling was missing a panel where the cables from the array and cameras fed into the server rack mounted against the wall.

Cassie’s voice followed her, though Hunter was decidedly not listening. The work wasn’t done yet.

She could pop out the storage drives and ensure they were destroyed if she wanted to make sure there was no evidence, but she only needed to slow down retrieval and identification. Hunter pulled the pin on her last grenade and slid it into the gap between the network stack above and the storage array below, and got out as quickly as she could. If anyone wanted to pull data out of it they would have to rip any remaining flash from the boards and manually reconstruct it, which was never worth the time and effort.

Now the work was done. If there were any survivors they’d chosen not to engage, and they wouldn’t be able to get word out until the next shift rotation, probably early morning. They would be long gone by then and it would take even longer to identify any of them.

The moment Ilina stepped out of the checkpoint office would be burned into her mind for the rest of Krystyn’s life. Maybe she’d become worse, somehow inured to the scenes of careless violence left in her master’s wake. A room littered with the bodies of soldiers — might as well been innocents for all the fight they could muster. Blood dripped from the metal studs embedded in the knuckles of her fingerless gloves and clung to the creases and treads of her boots. The scent of iron and gunpowder would cling to her for days, no matter how thoroughly Krystyn would try to scrub it out.

And somehow the sight of Ilina holding the small rifle close across her chest, glancing back over her shoulder toward the carnage and seeing the light catch those hollow eyes, lit a need in her.

Revolution was a fantasy. Seven years ago Krystyn would swear up and down that the idea of seeing Domon in ashes was impossible. Sometimes she still felt that way, looking out at fields of mulched steel and ravaged cities. Halbach still thinks that way, surely. Seeing the Corpse Princess in action once wasn’t enough to change anyone’s mind on something so grand.

But fuck. Fuck. This was how heroes were born. Moments like these that seized your heart in a vice and made you realize it was possible. This person can change the world. Not alone, nobody can do that, but with the right support.

Ilina tugged down her scarf and turned back to Halbach suddenly. “Go get a medkit.” Halbach nodded and turned back into the building quick, giving Krystyn a moment alone with her master. “You’re crying,” Ilina brushed past her attempted hug and reached up to wipe away tears that had started rolling down her cheek. “Are you okay?”

“I’m okay.” Krystyn smiled stupidly. “You’re beautiful, by the way.”

“You’re bleeding.”

“I love you.”

Ilina pushed Krystyn backward into the backseat of the jeep. Fuck. If this was where she wanted it, how could Krystyn complain? But instead Ilina turned in time to catch a flying medical kit. “I’ll patch you up on the road,” her voice had dropped low and gotten soft. “How bad?”

“Three stitches, maybe?”

“Alright.”

Halbach peeled out of the checkpoint at top speed the second all three of them were in, as if anyone was going to scout them out with a drone. She slowed after they’d made some distance so Ilina could work with steady hands. A flashlight between her teeth to illuminate the place where one of the bullets tore through her arm. A grazing shot, not too deep, but it needed treatment. Ilina rinsed it with a saline spray and disinfected it with alcohol. It stung but she didn’t flinch and more importantly didn’t let out anything that might sound like a whimper. Ilina threaded the hook and pulled the first stitch effortlessly despite the vehicle’s movement.

Ilina’s face was focused entirely on this act of care, of service. Every movement was measured and careful, and Krystyn had been trained not to squirm under the attention. More importantly, Krystyn had learned not to try to help. No trying to get ahead of Ilina in the process like getting the gauze or bandage ready to go. Let her work. Let her do this.

“When we get to the Lazarus you need to have someone pull out those stitches and seal it properly,” Ilina said as she dropped the light and tied off the bandage. “It probably won’t leave too big a scar.”

“Shame,” Krystyn teased. “You tend to like those.”

“This one is my fault,” Ilina’s voice was soft and quiet as she packed away the medical supplies. “I used you as a decoy and you got hurt.”

“You’re right.” Krystyn flexed her biceps to get a feel of her range of motion with the stitches in. “I like it a lot more when I hurt you.”

“Me too.”

“Ain’t you two the cutest,” Cassie cut in finally. “One of you get up front, I ain’t your damn chaperone.”

Ilina squeezed her thigh once and flashed that predatory little grin of hers before climbing over the seat and getting comfortable beside Halbach. A bloody bootprint stained the seat beside her. It was going to be even more annoying to scrub out once it all dried. Blood was always a chore to get out.

Dawn started to rise by the time they actually made it across the shallow river. It was hot and a little muggy and Krystyn was looking forward to getting a shower and a change of clothes when they called down one of the mobile meatshops from the Ossuary.

Darwin was an ugly little planet full of brushland plains and crater-lakes fed by rivers that looked like blood trickling through gravel. Gunshot wounds running in reverse, penetrated deep into the planet several kilometers deep by old orbitals. Morian suggested that some of the munitions would still be in the lake beds, not that you could ever reach them with post-purge technology. It was an ugly planet, but it was home to someone. A place worth defending.

Terros Ridge was easy to spot. It was a sheer rock face jutting out of the ground, an extended plate of stone and earth that fed into one of those crater-lakes. She felt like a sap, thinking it was sort of beautiful. The empire’s terraforming was a type of artistry, and a skilled painter could make a masterpiece of a place like this. The plant and animal life tailored to its starting conditions to create a self-sustaining ecosystem.

The shadows stretched long across the plains in the early sun and Krystyn could imagine Lazarus 01 touching down. Monstrous in size, dwarfing Terros Ridge and all its internals. Somewhere on the horizon was the capital, an anthill awaiting its magnifying glass, and hopefully by dusk tomorrow it’ll still be there, intact and teeming with life.

Ilina was good at holding back when she needed to be.